Page 46 of The Cadence
“Why do you look so upset?” I asked him. There was the obvious, of course, but now he seemed very angry.
“My mother and I are discussing her plans for—”
“William!” His mother now stood at the end of the hallway, and she also looked angry. More like furious. “That is a family matter.”
“I tell Calla everything important,” he said. “She’ll hear it now or later, but she’ll hear it.”
His mom turned her glare from him onto me and then swiveled and left. “Holy Moses, she’s mad,” I whispered.
“She’s spiraling because I suggested that she should sell this place and move somewhere smaller that’s easier to take care of.” He walked into the front room, which was kind of empty. This house looked nice from the outside but I’d noticed that there were important things missing, like furniture. In that way, it reminded me of Will’s home up north and it made more sense why he’d been ok to live like that.
He stood at the window. “I should have known better than to bring it up,” he said. “This house was important to both of them.”
“Is it historic or something?” It was definitely pretty.
“It’s old, but I meant that it was important for them to feel like they hadn’t lost everything. They believed in the power and privilege of the Bodine name, and this place represented some of that. They hung on, even when we didn’t have electricity because the bill hadn’t been paid, and even when my mother would cry for hours about the selling the furniture and threaten…”
“What?” I prompted when he stopped. “What did she threaten?”
“When she got very worried, she would make dramatic pronouncements about hurting herself, throwing herself off the roof or jumping from the Walnut Street Bridge. I knew she didn’t mean it.”
It didn’t surprise me very much. “She never actually tried those things,” I confirmed, and he shook his head.
“No. She wanted attention from my father.” Will turned to face me. “We’re a seriously fucked-up family, Calla. All of us.”
“No, not you.”
“Yes, me too,” he said. “I’ve spent all day coming across even more proof of it.”
“But—”
“Never mind,” he said. “Did you eat?”
He wouldn’t talk about it anymore. We ended up getting takeout and it was wonderful, but the atmosphere at the house was not. His mother was clearly still furious but she was covering that by acting overly sweet, in a sickening kind of way. He barely spoke and I wasn’t sure of what to say myself, except, “No, ma’am,”“Yes, please,” and other statements like that. They talked for a moment as I waited in the car, and it was a huge relief when we finally left. I sighed with a big whoosh and when I looked across the car at Will, he did, too.
Then we both smiled at each other, and that felt so much better.
“She apologized for getting angry like that. She’s sometimes tough to take,” he said. “She steps into the martyr role pretty easily, but I don’t blame her. She put up with my dad for a long time. He wasn’t so much of a total asshole when she married him.”
“No?”
“No, but he’d already been kicked out of two colleges by that point, so she might have seen a problem in the making. He got kicked out of his private school here, too, the one that generations of Bodines had attended. They offered me a scholarship to come play football for them and I said no because I was trying to show solidarity with him. Stupid of me,” he remarked, and shook his head.
“You did ok without that school. You did amazing!”
“Sometimes I wonder what our lives would have been like if she had left him. Why didn’t she?”
“Some women like the ‘bad boy’ thing,” I said. “They think, ‘I can reform him. My love will fix him!’”
“You sound sarcastic,” he pointed out. “You don’t agree that a man can reform?”
“Remember who you’re talking to,” I answered. “I was the one going up to the penitentiary every week to visit the man who refused to be reformed no matter how many times he got locked up or how much he hurt his mother.”
“Your father,” he said, and I shrugged.
“He was never going to straighten out, never, no matter how much my grandma wanted him to, no matter how much she prayed on it or hoped for something different. We are who we are.”
“So there’s no changing us,” Will summed up. “That’s a damning take on humanity.”
